Michelle Teheux: Is your TV sucking your life away?

Wednesday

Sep 19, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 19, 2012 at 7:16 PM

I have a recurring fantasy of taking a baseball bat to my TV, thus removing its irritating presence from my life. I won’t ever really do that, of course. Not only do other family members like to watch a little TV, but I watch it myself occasionally.

Michelle Teheux

I have a recurring fantasy of taking a baseball bat to my TV, thus removing its irritating presence from my life.

I won’t ever really do that, of course. Not only do other family members like to watch a little TV, but I watch it myself occasionally.

My problem is that I can’t help but see TV as one of the worst parts of modern life, and it creeps out into your life whether you want it to or not.
I have never watched “Jersey Shore” and have a difficult time imagining how one turns a bunch of partying young people into an entire TV show. Yet I cannot escape knowing all about Snookie and her new baby.

Ditto for the inane Kardashians, teen moms and other dreck. I understand there is even a show about cupcakes.

Cupcakes?

There certainly is some good stuff available on TV, especially on PBS, but I have yet to walk through a supermarket checkout line and see headlines about who the stars of “Downton Abbey” are having affairs with.

Thank goodness.

It isn’t so much that I think zoning out in front of the TV is so harmful in and of itself as that I wonder what more interesting stuff people aren’t partaking of or paying attention to as they passively park themselves in front of their TVs.

Better to spend an afternoon baking your own cupcakes than to watch others make them.

And if you like to watch people do whatever the heck it is they do on “Jersey Shore,” book a darned vacation to the Jersey shore! Or at least go to the pool. Sheesh.

As for all the families and couples who have cameras recording their every move so others can sit slack-jawed on their sofas and take it all in, there’s a better alternative there, too.

Instead, be the kind of interesting family that others would want to watch.

Many is the time I’ve (almost) wished a camera had caught a particularly entertaining exchange at my house. I seriously doubt anything going on in reality-TV-land could be more fun to me than what is going on under my own roof.

In part, that’s because we’re not lined up in front of the TV for hours on end.

How often do you hear people complain that they are tired or wish they had more time for their family, friends, hobbies, housework, yardwork, working out, keeping up with politics or whatever?

For some people, that state is reached because their lives are full of meaningful activities.

For others the time crunch comes from TV — or from equally useless hours spent treating a computer as a TV.

Perhaps the answer is to start thinking of yourself as a reality TV star. Sell the idea to your family members that you need to come up with some cool and interesting things to do that everybody will want to see. (Just don’t make the mistake of posting all this stuff to Facebook or YouTube, because in reality none of us wants to see it.)

Perhaps you’ll all try to “survive” an afternoon in your backyard. Or will have a cupcake war with your spouse. Or pop a tiara on your toddler’s head, right after purchasing that item from a pawn shop. Or just do whatever the heck it is that a bunch of Kardashians might do all day — I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

Do something other than contribute to the inanity of American society by feeding this extremely troubling trend of turning ordinary life into TV shows and making bad TV shows a big part of ordinary life.

Just forget about starring in a reality show about an irritable woman who takes baseball bats to TVs. I’ve got that one in development already.

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